But that was just the first draft of the official truth, and it didn’t fly. The UN contradicted the story at every turn, and the Israeli government eventually had to concede that its narrative was baseless. The school was not, and had never been a valid military target.

For a few days the government was content to leave the story as-is, and indeed it created enough other stories of civilian massacres to draw some of the attention away. Something about deliberately attacking a girls’ school full of civilians just didn’t sit well with the overall “doing everything we can to prevent innocent loss of life” storyline, so the story has been changed, again.